Big Fun is one of the forgotten items in Miles Davis's discography. Recorded with four different bands (one for each of its album-side-long cuts), it falls somewhere between the expansive soundscapes of Bitches Brew and the chugging, anarchic funk-noise ...
These are not sacred texts. They are pieces of music. Yes, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker is probably the Colossus of modern jazz history, the legendary junkie genius who effectively (together with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell, trumpeter Miles ...
Christopher Hitchens is, if not always agreeable, usually entertaining. The character he’s created: a fat, drunken, chain-smoking hack journalist, taking advantage of the USA’s looser libel laws to hurl scabrous imprecations in every direction, livens up whatever Washington talk ...
Joe McPhee is, by the evidence presented on this CD, one of the truly great musicians of the postwar era, and probably one of the most criminally ignored. This disc, originally released on Cj Records in 1971 and only ...
Suggested reading: Silence (1973), John Cage Talking Music: Conversations With John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers (1999), William Duckworth The music of John Cage represents "difficulty" ...
The quickest test of whether or not Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Ex-Friends might appeal to you is by your level of interest in the controversy that erupted over Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar at last year’s Academy Awards. If you were ...
Let's say you're 15 years old and you want to annoy your parents. But how? Dad used to stagedive at Black Flag shows and Mom embarrasses you by wearing her old Dead Kennedys T-shirt to the grocery store. ...
Other Frederick Busch books The Night Inspector is a great American novel about the country’s dark night of the soul. Prolific novelist and short story writer Frederick Busch - author of more ...
John Fuegi's 1994 biography of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is an exhaustive monument to academic scholarship gone awry. At over 700 pages (including nearly 100 pages of endnotes), Brecht and Company is the longest full-scale Brecht biography in print. It ...
Novel with Cocaine is narrated by a young Russian hedonist living in Moscow during the tumultuous years of 1916 to 1919. As the country plunges deeper into the First World War, Vadim Maslennikov plunges instead into prostitutes. When the ...
